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NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Charging for cached ad views
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Charging for cached ad views
Rick Bruner (rick_at_bruner.net)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 00:26:55 -0800
In response to a question from Richard Hoy, Tom Hespos wrote:
>If cache-busting was adopted industry-wide, CPMs would have to be driven
>down. It's a supply and demand thing. I'm not sure the industry's
>ready for such a shakedown.
Several times in Tom's posting here, he used the term "cache-busting" in
reference to how Imgis & MatchLogic treat the caching problem. I'm not an
expert on this exactly, but as I understand from briefings I've had from
both companies for my reporting for Advertising Age, it wouldn't be
accurate to call what they do "cache-busting." In the case of MatchLogic
anyway, which I'm more familiar with, their big claim to fame with this is
that they don't "bust" the proxy caches, but rather work in conjunction
with them.
It's a significant point, as true cache-busting already has been adopted
industry-wide, and it drives the people using the proxy servers nuts.
Basically, cache-busting thwarts the efforts of the proxy server to reduce
traffic with cached impressions. Most of the ad serving products --
NetGravity, Accipiter, etc. -- make it easy for sites to try to fool the
proxy services with techniques such as updating the banner ad file name
every second with a new time stamp, so the proxy thinks it's a new object
when it checks back to the server and it downloads the same image it
already has in its cache again. Thus, the ad server can count a new
download. The administrators of the proxy servers fight back with means
such as setting the proxy server to check for new material only every 20
minutes or so, meaning that all the ads served from the cached page in the
meantime are served out of cache and are not counted by the ad server (or
hence billed to the advertiser by the site). Most large media sites one way
or another participate in such "cache-busting" techniques, as far as I've
heards.
MatchLogic and Imgis (so I'm told, tho they're sorry they haven't made as
big of a PR deal of the method as MatchLogic has) do something different.
As far as I understand, MatchLogic's True Count, before trying to serve the
ad, sends a ping to the proxy server inquiring whether the ad it wants to
serve is already in the proxy's cache. If it is, then True Count just sends
a command that the ad should be served to the browser out of the cache. If
it's not in the cache, True Count will serve the ad to the viewer itself
and make sure it gets cached so it can serve it out of the proxy server's
cache next time. I gather Imgis does pretty much the same thing.
Two points are significant in this. First, it doesn't "bust" the cache by
sending the same ad graphic repeatedly over the same network connection,
defeating the how bandwidth-preservation objective of the proxy servers.
Rather, it works in tandem with them, sending only small text commands.
Second, it not only can count the ads served from the proxy cache, but it
can manage them from there, so that if you're doing dynamic targeting, it
can do so out of the cache.
For anyone deeply interested in issues of proxy caching, and their greater
social and business implications, such as national censorship, copyright
violation or spoofing, I recommend an excellent, in-depth article that
Russell Tewksbury wrote for the January/February 1998 issue of
"OnTheInternet" Magazine, the bi-monthly journal of The Internet Society.
Russell has a link to it on his own site: http://www.goforit.com/cache/
Also, it's worth pointing out that the folks who *really* get around the
caching question are those serving streaming interactive Java ads, such as
Narrative/Enliven, and a few smaller companies like Thinking Media
(www.thethinkingmedia.com) and Zapa. Because of their their streaming Java
technology, they have a back-channel of information where the ad itself can
report back amazing information from the user's brower to the server, such
as how many times the ad has been served out of the local browser cache,
how long it was displayed, what parts of the ad a mouse simply passed over,
and so on.
Rick
-----------------------------------------------------------
Rick E. Bruner rick_at_bruner.net
Bruner Communications tel: 1+(415) 351-2489
Strategic Web mktg consultancy http://www.bruner.net
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